The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, has urged Donald Trump to assure “Dreamers”, the nearly 800,000 undocumented young people brought to the US as children, that they should not fear being deported over the next six months as the program that shields them is phased out.
Trump duly issued a morning tweet regarding his decision to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca). “For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about – No action!” the president wrote.
“This is what I asked the president to do and boom, boom, boom, the tweet appeared,” Pelosi said at a weekly press conference on Thursday.
Pelosi, a Democrat from California, home to the largest share of Dreamers, said she told the president: “‘People really need a reassurance from you, Mr President, that the six-month period is not a period of round-up but it’s just that Daca is frozen and that these people will not be vulnerable.’”
Trump placed calls to Pelosi and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, as well as the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on Thursday morning, just hours after the president infuriated members of his party by siding with the Democrats on spending and debt.
That surprise deal between Trump and congressional Democrats, which passed the Senate on Thursday afternoon, will pave the way for billions of dollars in aid for Texas and other areas devastated by Hurricane Harvey, alongside a three-month extension on the debt ceiling and government funding.
On Thursday, Trump said the agreement heralded a new era of bipartisanship after years of bitter acrimony and predicted a “different relationship”.
“I think we will have a different relationship than we’ve been watching over the last number of years,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I think that’s a great thing for our country. And I think that’s what the people of the United States want to see. They want to see some dialogue.”
Whether such sentiment will extend to actually passing legislation for Dreamers remains to be seen. For more than a decade, lawmakers have failed to pass legislation to protect such young people from deportation. Congress now has just six months to turn the expiring Daca policy into law, while the fate of its recipients hangs in the balance.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he would work with “Chuck and Nancy” – the Democrats – to preserve the Daca program.
Pelosi said the president had clearly indicated that he would sign into law a measure that protects Dreamers and includes funding for increased border security.
“We made very clear in the course of the conversation that the priority was to pass the dream act,” Pelosi said, referring to their Wednesday Oval office meeting. “Obviously it has to be bipartisan, the president said he supports that.”
Though Democrats on Wednesday called for Republicans to pass a standalone bill to protect Dreamers, Pelosi signaled that her party would be open to negotiating on border enforcement – up to a point. Democrats remain firmly opposed to providing funding to build a wall along the south-west border.
“We have a responsibility to secure the border,” she said, adding that such legislation would not include appropriations for a wall.
During a live interview with the New York Times on Thursday morning, Speaker Ryan said he planned to bring a “consensus plan” to the House floor in the next few months.
Ryan, who had urged Trump not to cancel Daca, said such legislation would aim to enshrine the program into law and provide more resources for enforcement. The speaker said he believes it is “perfectly reasonable” to pair such immigration reforms in one bill, because Dreamers are a symptom of a porous border.
“We need to control our borders while we deal with this problem so that we don’t have the same problem 10 years from now,” Ryan told reporters at a press conference later on Thursday. “That’s just perfectly reasonable.”
He added: “Obviously funding the border is part of controlling the border.”
